Nicaragua, 1986

Seven Years On

by Adam Jones (1986)

[Originally published in Latin America
Connexions, 1:4 and 1:5 (1986).]

Graffiti in Nicaragua, 1986, commemorating the seventh anniversary of the revolution and the death of Carlos Fonseca ten years earlier: "Carlos: We will paint anew your subversive signs: Today is for struggle - Rest is for the future." Photo by Adam Jones.

I.

Managua, Nicaragua. The Aeronica jet
banks low over Sandino International Airport and the city sprawls out below
us, hugging the shores of the lake. Away in the distance is the mountainside
with its huge "FSLN" insignia. We skim past a ditch full of the carcasses
of World War II-era Corvair fighters, past a couple of hangars housing
dangerous-looking MI-24 attack helicopters. Then we're down.

This is where abstractions become
reality. In Canada, Nicaragua means war, peace, independence, anti-imperialism,
self-determination - pick your ideal. Here it is a humid dusk, a rickety
ride down streets whose paving stones were torn up for barricades during
the insurrection. Billboards. Dust and diesel. A young Sandinista couple
in khaki military garb, strolling along a sidestreet, locked in an embrace.

I went expecting a defensive, cowed
revolution, a social transformation stuck in a holding pattern. I came
away marvelling at the energy and vitality of the Nicaraguans I met: their
generosity and confidence and resilience. In a very real way it seems,
as Anna-Patricia Elvir told we Tools for Peace delegates at our wrap-up
meeting, that "the Revolution is more vibrant, more alive than ever."

Anna-Patricia is a slight, relaxed
25-year-old with a wry smile and omnipresent cigarette. She is also General
Secretary of the CNSP, the organization responsible for helping to shape
the political dimension of solidarity campaigns like Tools for Peace. On
our first morning in Managua, at CNSP headquarters in the city's Bologna
district, she leans back in her chair and tells us where her country stands.

"Right now there's nothing new happening
in Nicaragua. The present conditions are the product of six years of U.S.
aggression. But the attack has increased. In 1982, we were still talking
about development; we had 36 major investment plans and hundreds of smaller
ones." The wry smile. "Then reality intruded. For investment you need stability
and the kind of material and technological base that Nicaragua just doesn't
have. As of last year we began to talk about simple survival."

II.

That switch was the reason for the creation
of the Campaña Nicaragua Debe Sobrevivir: Nicaragua Must
Survive. All aid projects from groups like Tools for Peace - groups which
have a strong political as well as material element - are now being channelled
through a centralized distribution agency in Nicaragua to ensure that priority
items are sent where they are most desperately needed.

For Tools for Peace, it means a move
away from the kind of broad, somewhat chaotic collection campaigns of years
past, and a shift in the direction of a more focused, more overtly political
campaign that concentrates on the collection en masse of a few priority
items. Hammers. Saws. Rubber boots. Pencils. Blankets. Sanitary napkins.
At Berta Calderón Women's Hospital in Managua, most of the bedsheets
have been destroyed by patients' tearing them up for rags during their
periods. The nation's supply of sanitary napkins is miniscule, and is not
expected to last beyond October.

Anna-Patricia is the first of dozens
of Nicaraguans to tell us that Tools for Peace, and the international solidarity
it symbolizes, are of immense importance. There are ways of saying this
sort of thing in a pat, token kind of way - Thanks a lot, comrades
- and then there are ways of saying it that can make you glow or bring
tears to your eyes, make you realize that people are actually counting
on you.

In Nicaragua we get the latter, day
after day, from people who speak to us as friends: people who in many cases
are our own age, like Anna-Patricia - thrust into positions of responsibility
that in North America would be reserved for safe middle-aged bureaucrats.
"The people of Nicaragua see you foreigners as the hope," Anna-Patricia
says. "When Daniel Ortega goes to Paris, or New York, or Harare, and we
see on TV thousands of people cheering him, it fills us with pride. And
we see that even if we die, there are others around the world to carry
on the battle."

Tools for Peace, she tells us, "means
a machete for a Nicaraguan peasant being attacked by U.S. terrorism. It
means a roof over his head, notebooks for his children who are continuing
their education in spite of the war. It means medicine for our people to
maintain the advances made in health since 1979." This year, as last, some
of the material aid received in Nicaragua (particularly the industrial
and agricultural implements) will be sold, rather than given outright,
to workers and peasants in the country.

"We feel people should receive foreign
aid, but also should give something of themselves in return, to imbue Nicaraguans
with the kind of self-sufficiency which is going to be vital in the future.
Originally we had a very paternalistic attitude to the workers, you know.
It encouraged passivity on their part, because work for them had always
been a form of exploitation." The money collected from the sales is ploughed
back into the impoverished economy.

Conceptually, it's a little difficult
to get used to. Then you realize that this is how maximum value is obtained.
Nicaragua, after five years of brutal war, with over half the national
budget going to the military defence of the country and the revolution,
is in an emergency situation.

And if it's a problem for us, what
is it like for the Nicaraguans like Anna-Patricia who have to handle the
distribution of aid? "Our country is so impoverished," she says matter-of-factly,
"that every time a product arrives, twenty hands stretch out to grab it.
We have to decide who should have it and when. We've learned over the years
when we are faced with three hungry faces to say no to two of them. We've
had to make difficult decisions and sometimes cruel ones, with the coldest
analytical reasoning."

She is nothing if not straightforward.

III.

We eat a very lavish lunch - the first
of many - at La Terraza, a smart restaurant that was once a private club
in Managua's old downtown area. Felix Miranda is the director and head
waiter at La Terraza: a dapper old gentleman in a red tuxedo and bow tie.
We sit him down and ask him to tell us some of the changes at the establishment
since the revolution.

He's happy to oblige. After the triumph,
he says, La Terraza owed a great deal of money to its personnel. The owners
sold off most of the fixtures, down to the furniture, to pay off some of
the debt. The place still wasn't viable. So the employees took it over,
and were apportioned shares in the enterprise according to the debt they
were owed.

Today, even with the economy in shambles,
La Terraza is making money; lesser shareholders take the same percentage
of profits as larger ones. Felix points out that now the restaurant is
open to anyone at all, not just the elite - but prices are high by Managua
standards, and most of the clientele seems pretty well-heeled.

What about the personal changes in
his life since 1979? Felix grins. "You know, I always wanted to
set up a restaurant of my own, and after the revolution we had one handed
to us!"

After lunch we lounge around at Xilaó,
an idyllic volcanic lake in the hills around Managua. Opportunities for
indolence will be few and far between on this trip, and we are encouraged
to make the most of them. The sky is bright blue, the water warm. The concrete
pathways scorch our soles. Two young local kids, Rodolfo and Manuel, hitch
a ride back to the city with us. They receive a lot of attention and some
camera clicking.

We promise to send them a couple
of copies of the photos. Where do they live in Managua? But addresses in
the capital city are notoriously vague, sometimes centring on where a particular
building once stood, years ago. They don't seem to have much of a conception
of "address": they know where they live, so what's the problem?
We try again. Perhaps their parents work at a more coherent location.

"What does your father do?" Scott,
our translator, asks Manuel.

"He does nothing," Manuel replies.
"They killed him in the war."

"How does your family get by?"

"My mother sells white wrapping paper
in the market."

There is a pause. "Rodolfo?"

Rodolfo says his father is in prison.
He was a member of Somoza's National Guard, and he committed some crimes.

We let the two off in town, Rodolfo
fiddling with a bright new Canada pin impaled on his grimy T-shirt. I feel
sad and speechless until I notice the twinkle in Scott's eye. He's smiling,
amused. "If we picked them up tomorrow, they'd probably tell us something
completely different."

Scott learned his Spanish in Spain,
and speaks it like a native. He has lived in Nicaragua for three years
and is married to a Salvadorean woman. In 1980, he flew into El Salvador
with Quebec MP Jacques Couture to attend the funeral of six FDR opposition
members assassinated by Salvadorean security forces. As they were passing
through the airport to their waiting van, they met two American nuns, Maryknoll
sisters, awaiting the arrival of two other sisters from Nicaragua. Scott
thinks he and his party might have been the last to speak to the Maryknolls,
who left the airport about half an hour later and were seized by soldiers,
raped, and brutally murdered on their way back to the capital.

IV.

Dinner at the hotel, and Anna-Patricia
brings a friend. We'd asked her, earlier, for a few details about her own
past: how she'd got involved with the FSLN, her role during the insurrection,
and so on. She finds it difficult to talk about herself. Whatever they've
done, she says, people in Nicaragua always know someone else whose dedication
and sacrifice makes their own pale in comparison. Anna-Patricia knows Alma
Nubia Baltodano.

Alma is 23: cheerful and animated,
with a reckless, insouciant intelligence. After dinner and some idle conversation,
we ask to hear her story.

The first thing she tells us is she
feels proud and privileged to be part of the revolution. She grew up in
León and got involved with the active anti-Somoza movement there
which produced people like Omar Cabezas, author of the classic Fire
from the Mountain. Eventually her family moved to Managua.

"In 1978 I joined the FSLN squad
in my barrio. It had various functions: mainly political work, plus some
small-scale military work. We started to make contact bombs, very rudimentary:
newspaper, stones, powder, masking tape; that was that. And we went out
painting the walls in the wee hours of the morning.

"I want to say something, and I don't
know if you'll understand its importance: the family thing. I mean, my
family didn't know I'd joined the FSLN, and suddenly I was having all these
male visitors, compañeros in the struggle, older than me,
and I was going out at all hours of the night. My mother was saying, 'What's
going on here?' So eventually she started coming out with me! And she found
out what I was up to. She said, 'Okay, fine, go and do what you want.'
That was very important to me.

"In 1979, I moved on to another kind
of work. At that time, each FSLN squad - tactical combat units, they were
called - was responsible for several neighbourhoods in Managua. In April
1979, these units with their popular action committees were planning on
taking over a neighbourhood - the one where we were living. Our task was
to distract the National Guard with diversionary tactics. One of these
tactics was making the contact bombs, which you'd throw late in the evening
or really early in the morning when the Guard was patrolling, to scare
them shitless.

"One of the bombs exploded in my
hands."

She pauses and knits her brows in
concentration.

"Everything we were doing was illegal.
You have to realize that: it's what we lived with; we were mentally prepared
for disaster. It didn't matter. Just to be young at that time was a crime
in itself. When the bomb went off, I think I lost consciousness for a few
seconds. There were a few of us in there, we were lucky; I was the only
one seriously hurt. The first thing we thought about was how to get the
hell out of there, the garage where we were putting these devices together.
I couldn't go out in the condition I was in."

She waited there with her hands blown
off. "I remember telling myself of everything the struggle meant to us,
to keep me going. Who could get to us first, the Guard or the compañeros?
Well, it was a compañero. They took me to a clinic, a maternity
clinic! We had to lie to the doctors, and of course, they didn't believe
us. It was a tense situation and they shifted me after three days to a
safe house, gave me what care they could. They operated on me with razor
blades."

When the insurrection came, her comrades
told her she would have to go to an embassy and ask for asylum; keeping
her hidden was becoming too risky. "I found that option very hard to take.
But it was an order." She went to the Venezuelan embassy, but at the end
of June her compañeros came and took her with them on the
FSLN's own "Long March," the tactical retreat from Managua to Masaya that
immediately preceded the final victory. "Two days before the Triumph they
took me to Costa Rica. That's there I was on July 19, 1979. Then they took
me to Cuba for medical treatment. I was there till December and came back
to join the literacy brigades."

Doctors in East Germany outfitted
her with the prosthetic "claws" that she uses to eat and write and rummage
for cigarettes. When she returned to Nicaragua she joined the Sandinista
Youth League, in which she is now an official.

We chat on into the evening, the
excellent Flor de Caña rum disappearing at an even pace. Alma talks
a little about subjects like the general amnesty for ex-National Guardsmen
and the contra war. I've heard from Anna-Patricia about her boyfriend,
and I ask the question, delicately. She shrugs. "I had a boyfriend. He
was killed last year. It's not an easy thing to talk about." For the first
time, there are tears in her eyes.

V.

The country itself: I hadn't expected
such beauty. One tends to think geography will reflect economy, that a
poor country under attack will somehow be desiccated, barren, shopworn.
Instead, the lushness of spirit we encounter in the people seems mirrored
in their physical environment.

It has been a harsh year climatically
for Nicaragua. Thirty-five million dollars was lost in this year's cotton
harvest alone due to drought conditions. We have to remind ourselves, wiping
the sweat from our brows or applying protective grease to chapped lips,
that this is supposed to be the height of the rainy season. But the land,
viewed from the window of our León-bound minibus, is lovely nonetheless.
For even the scruffiest vista there is a backdrop of brilliant hills, covered
with billowing clouds of green foliage.

After the aimless, earthquake-shattered
sprawl of Managua, León is a spectacular city. It is all crumbling
colonial grandeur, fiery murals, rich slashes of Sandinista red-and-black
nestled among bullet holes on every plaster façade. Founded in 1610,
it is Nicaragua's second-largest city, and perhaps its most staunchly militant.
Carlos Fonseca, the pre-eminent founder of the Sandinista movement, came
from here; León is known as "The City of the Three Insurrections"
for the uprisings against Somoza mounted in 1959, 1978, and - victoriously
- 1979. I find it impossible to walk the streets without my pace quickening
to a march and my heart beating faster.

On Sunday morning in León,
a couple of hundred raucous kids gather in the central plaza for a rally
of the Association of Sandinista Children (ANS). The cathedral bells peal.
In response, the plaza's tinny loudspeakers blare a familiar melody, which
takes me a minute to pick up on. It is John Cougar Mellencamp, "R.O.C.K.
in the U.S.A." I sing along, laughing at the incongruity of it all.

A couple of blocks away a ragtag
group of children drags a dog around on a rope leash, whacking and slashing
at it with sticks and leather belts, laughing gleefully as it yelps and
dodges. They deal it a few sharp strokes for good measure as it lies prostrate
on the ground. "The dog is loco," they tell me warily. But it doesn't look
crazy, just exhausted and dazed; it pants, eyes glazed over, and lets me
stroke its paw soothingly. I want to tell the children that just down the
road is the building where the National Guard once took prisoners for torture,
and giggled with the same gratuitous infliction of pain on fellow creatures.
But I don't speak Spanish.

VI.

The region around León is one
of the most important in the country for production of export crops and
basic foodstuffs. This year it's been hit particularly hard by the drought.
Most of the cotton crop has been destroyed - and this is where more than
90 percent of Nicaragua's cotton is grown.

Gladys Baéz is one of the
most famous women in Nicaragua: a true hero to thousands for her work in
the revolution (she was a close comrade-in-arms of Carlos Fonseca); a member
of the National Assembly and the Sandinista Assembly. Smiling, with long
twin braids halfway down her back, she sits with us in a stiflingly close
meeting room in León and talks about the country's predicament.

"What we see coming is a tremendous
period of hunger. All the mass organizations are encouraging people to
plant family and community gardens. Meanwhile, we can only hope for better
results from the second crop in 1986."

And again we hear it: "There are
two things that really strengthen our hope for the future. One is the immense
effort made by our own people; the other is the efforts of international
solidarity workers like you. We know your expectations of us. We won't
let you down."

We talk for a while about agriculture
and the impact of Tools for Peace in this region, which has been very positive.
On the way out, I spy a slogan scrawled in the lobby. Nuestro mejor
triunfo es cumplir siete años: Our greatest victory is to have
made it through seven years.

VII.

The port of Corinto is Nicaragua's largest.
It was also the site of a spectacular and devastating act of sabotage carried
out by the CIA. On October 10th, 1983, speedboats and planes attacked the
oil refinery tanks onshore, causing the evacuation of 27,000 people and
direct economic losses of $1.5 million.

Francisco, a man of movie-star good
looks, is Assistant Manager of fishery plant operations at Corinto. Graciously,
in a soft voice, he delivers a numbing account of the calamities that have
struck the fishing industry at Corinto.

Twenty-two shrimp fishing vessels
currently operate out of the port. Most of them are 16 to 18 years old
and in need of constant repair. In May 1983, Corinto's oil tanks were attacked
for the first time, by air, stopping work at the port for five days. In
December of the same year, two months after the devastation at the refinery,
a speedboat attack blew up a fishing boat, killing the captain.

In 1984 the port was mined by the
CIA's "unilaterally controlled Latino assets." When foreign vessels struck
the mines, Francisco says, "Foreign captains began to insist that Nicaraguan
boats precede them into port - guinea pigs, to make sure the path was clear."
Five boats were sunk. They were refloated, but some still have not been
repaired.

A loan from the Inter-American Development
Bank (IADB), granted under the Carter Administration for offices and ship-repair
docks, did not filter through until 1984. A significant portion of it was
blocked by the Reagan Administration. About 60 percent of the loan, or
US $24 million, still has not been delivered. "We're afraid it too will
be blocked by the U.S.," Francisco says. In the meantime, of course, prices
- for construction and materials, as for everything else - have risen significantly.

"In order to keep going here we've
had to ask our workers to make an immense effort. They've had very little
theoretical training; everything's been learned on the job. Our potential
production capacity is 250,000 pounds of shrimp a month. But the deficiencies
in our infrastructure mean we could only feasibly produce 100,000 pounds,
and right now a lot less."

Nature, too, has not been kind this
year. The drought that kills the cotton crop inland also warms the waters
close to shore. The shrimp head for cooler climes further out, and that
makes them harder to catch. Francisco estimates that the plant is working
at only 20 percent capacity overall. "At the moment seafood exports account
for about 4 percent of the country's exports. If we were producing at capacity,
it would be closer to 25 percent."

Afterward, painfully, we tour the
dock area. Several of the boats that hit mines are visible in drydock,
the wooden-hulled ones showing large patches of fresh planking where they
were ripped open. Further down wallow a few derelict vessels, half submerged.
From the end of one of the piers, we can see the tangled ruins of the refinery
tank destroyed in the contra attack. Another, also set ablaze, has a scorched
and lopsided appearance. I make myself look at the scene for a long time,
trying to etch it indelibly into my mind. This is the reality.

VIII.

Matagalpa, Monday. Karla Manfut is a
casually elegant young woman, a representative of the Sandino Foundation
in Region VI who totes an AK-47 along on visits to resettlement camps along
Nicaragua's northern roads.

She discusses the risks in a no-nonsense
way. "It's no game. We're not out to get ourselves martyred. You take what
security measures you can. I mean, I don't want to die; I have daughters.
You carry your gun so if you're attacked, you can at least get off a couple
of shots. That's not going to be much help if you run over a land mine,
of course. ...

"It's a matter of luck. Any number
of times we've been told a road is safe, driven along it, and found out
later that five or ten minutes after we passed a certain point, the contras
passed by too."

Region VI comprises the provinces
of Matagalpa and Jinotega. Together with Region I, to the west, it is where
most of the war is being fought. Contra operations have forced thousands
of peasants from their homes and land. They have been relocated in asentamientos,
resettlement camps, mostly organized into agricultural cooperatives. Coping
with the flood of displaced campesinos with the limited resources available
has proved an immense and complex task.

In priority areas like Region VI,
an aid project like Tools for Peace can accomplish a great deal. "In 1984,
we were deluged with materials from the campaign," says Karla's friend,
Marianne, who works directly with the asentamientos. "We worked
day and night on the inventory and more than 3000 families here ended up
benefitting directly, mainly with clothes and tools to build their own
houses."

The regional authorities are trying
to ensure that each resettlement camp has at least a school, visits from
nurses who move among the settlements giving medical attention, and potable
water systems. (Most of the water in rural areas is contaminated by the
rotted husks of coffee beans, and by animal excrement.) So far some $20
million has been spent on the relocation programs. This year the budget
has been cut - another casualty of spiralling defense costs - and Marianne
and her co-workers are depending on funds from foreign solidarity groups.

"We're hoping to receive even more
help from people like you," she tells us, "because the $100 million in
aid to the contras will almost certainly result in intensified sabotage,
more attacks on co-operatives, more displaced people."

The process of resettlement is complex.
"There are different situations. Twenty-five percent of the resettled families
were moved from the war zones. We went to the communities and explained
why they had to move, and gave them what support we could, like trucks
so they could take all their belongings with them. They tend to end up
living better because they can take those belongings along, which often
isn't the case with those families who are forcibly displaced by contra
attacks."

Opposition to the relocation campaign
has been less than might be expected. Certainly, there has been no repetition
of the clumsy and callous relocations forced upon Nicaragua's native Atlantic
Coast population during the early stages of the war there. Peasants often
find the land they are given in the resettlement areas is five or six times
as productive as the dry, stony mountain plots they left behind. According
to Marianne, they are also given the choice of farming individually - which
is the norm in the widely-dispersed, and thus highly vulnerable, northern
settlements - or combining in co-operatives. It's important not to tread
on toes if you can avoid it.

"It would be a lie to say that all
farmers are good Sandinistas," Marianne notes. "I mean, some of them are
with the contras, either by choice or by force. But most of them just want
to live in peace, and work - as farmers, not as Sandinistas or contras."

In the two months prior to our visit,
the contras had destroyed five resettlement camps. "Sometimes the people
say after an attack, 'Why didn't you give us some mortars, some machine
guns to defend ourselves? If you had, maybe we wouldn't have had people
killed.' It's very sad to hear that, because we just don't have enough
of those weapons to go around."

And yet, there has been at least
one valuable by-product of these years of suffering and destruction: the
changing role of rural women. The situation now is so extreme that it's
difficult for men to prevent their partners playing increasingly active
and productive roles in the family and community. In Nicaraguan cities
- and especially Managua - many women who'd been active in the revolution
have been forced back into traditional roles by their menfolk. But for
some peasant families just scraping by, machismo is a luxury they
can no longer afford.

Karla: "Before, we'd go to co-operatives
and the man would open the door, the woman would stay in the background.
Sometimes you wouldn't even see her, and if she offered her opinion it
was almost as though she had to ask her husband's permission to do so.

"Now that's changing. There are more
and more women prepared to speak their own minds without fear." It's a
long process, she adds, imbuing women with a new consciousness. But as
with the revolution itself, the longer the process continues, the less
are the chances of a reversion to traditional patterns of domination and
repression.

It makes me think of the people we've
met so far, how many of those who've made a strong impression on me - Alma,
Anna-Patricia, Karla, Marianne - have been women. There's an aura about
them of total commitment that never seems strident or doctrinaire. Perhaps
it results from a heightened recognition of the revolution's profound importance
- not just to the health of their societies, but to the fulfilment of their
own roles within society.

IX.

The scenery in this area is magnificent:
misty, coffee-laden hills, small cities with grand old colonial churches
nestled on the valley floor. The air is cool and fresh, liberally sprinkled
with rain. Those same mountains that provide camouflage and a place of
refuge for contras have a benign surface beauty, as if the bloodshed that
goes on under their canopy really has nothing to do with them at all.

In Jinotega, across a range of hills
from Matagalpa, we are due to visit a military hospital which also treats
civilians injured in contra attacks. We drive dutifully out, and run smack
into some nervous buck-passing while arrangements are checked and phone
calls to headquarters made. Eventually it transpires that the head doctor
is away for the day, and a tour of the hospital is out of the question.

Our schedule in the area has fallen
to pieces, generally and unavoidably. There is no saying from day to day
which roads will be safe, and for how long. The morning of our planned
visit to a cooperative, the trip is cancelled: there may be mines along
the road.

In Region VI, it appears that foreigners
are being specifically targeted in contra attacks. Several European aid
workers have been killed by mines and in ambushes in the last couple of
months: "a matter of bad luck, bad timing and the wrong place," according
to an American solidarity worker based in Matagalpa.

The contra leadership's latest trick
is passing around copies of weapons permits allegedly found on the bodies
of the dead foreigners. In typically scurrilous fashion, this is cited
a proof that the foreigners have been co-opted by the vicious Sandinistas
into helping with brutal government repression of the peasantry. No weapons
have actually been recovered from the corpses, mind you. And what if they
had been? Why shouldn't those Europeans have carried guns? After all, the
people who killed them did.

In Jinotega, by exquisite chance,
we run into a remarkable old man: a 75-year-old Sandinista who fought with
Sandino in the guerrilla leader's war against American occupying forces
back in the 1920s and '30s. Such living links to the past are cherished
in Nicaragua, and this proud gentleman is glad to point out the medal given
him by Daniel Ortega, confirming his status as one of the original revolutionary
force. He stands ramrod-straight for our photos, clearly basking in the
attention.

How did he feel when Sandino was
killed? The deep lines on his face contort with remembered rage. "Furious!
But I went into hiding, as an opponent of the government. Really! How were
my children going to eat? How was I going to send them to school?"

After the Triumph, he was mobilized
in a battalion as a fully-fledged member. Any tokenism there, friends,
and he'd probably have kicked some young upstart ass. I tell him: "I reckon
if we put two old-timers like you and Ronald Reagan together in a room,
we could be pretty sure who'd come out." When it's translated, he nods
emphatically and gives a vigorous thumbs-up.

X.

On Tuesday nights in Estelí,
a dusty cowboy town in northwestern Nicaragua, the Committee of Mothers
of Heroes and Martyrs meets to talk over old time and new plans. We've
been invited to one of their meetings, and we sit spellbound in their little
hall as they tell us their stories. The next day, September 10th, is the
eighth anniversary of the 1978 insurrection against Somoza - a trial run
for the Triumph less than a year later. The fighting was particularly fierce
in Estelí, which was one of the last towns to knuckle under to Somoza's
counterattack.

Alejandra Picado Martínez
remembers. "On a day like this, around midnight, we heard a bomb go off.
I was a little sick at the time; I heard the bomb and went back to sleep.
About half an hour later I woke up again and heard the kids moving about.
I wondered what was going on. One of my sons came in and told me that if
anything happened, he would be down at the end of the block. So at four
a.m. I got up and went around the various rooms to see where my children
were. None of them was there. They'd all gone off to take up their positions.
That was Sunday morning. On Monday, the planes began to bomb the city.
They bombed every day for nineteen days, all day long."

Clementina Rodríguez remembers.
"My children were part of the Revolutionary Students Federation at the
time, and I was involved in the group that later became the Association
of Nicaraguan Women. Our role was to try to organize more women for the
struggle, and to prepare food and medicine for the upcoming insurrection.
We were hiding guns in our attics too.

"During the insurrection, we intercepted
the National Guard's radio communications by stringing wires to our TV
antennas. That way we could tell which parts of town they were planning
to bomb and give the warning to evacuate. That's maybe the reason there
weren't too many casualties from the bombs themselves. And we could hear
the Guard over the radio, saying, 'Those sons-of-bitches are pretty good
shooters - they're killing us with .22s!'"

Cristina López remembers.
"I was supporting my children's activism even though I didn't really know
what the FSLN stood for. I began to grasp it when I saw how the Guardia
treated youth. They would drag them away in the middle of the night, with
no shoes, or naked - just take them away and shoot them. Once, right outside
my window, I saw the Guard build a bonfire. They took a kid out and threw
him into the fire. That's when I began to understand.

"Today we're organized, we're continuing
to support our sons so they can carry on the struggle of all Nicaraguans.
I've already had one son killed and I'm never turning back now."
A ripple of gunfire punctuates her speech - a signal of some kind, or a
celebration - and she smiles. "Thank you all for coming here. Some of you
might be a little scared hearing gunfire. I promise you, we're used to
it."

Cristina's son was killed fighting
the contras. Alejandra's son was killed at San Juan del Rio Coco in April
1979, not long before the Triumph. Since the advent of the war against
the contras, the ranks of the Mothers of Heroes and Martyrs have swelled
considerably.

The next day, the anniversary of
the insurrection, we attend a special mass for the Mothers on the upper
level of a ministry building. It's a lovely scene: an open balcony, silver
rain falling behind a fringe of tangled vines. The priest, clad in a white
cassock with a multicoloured woven scarf, mutters soothing words of comfort
and benediction. The Mothers whisper "Amen" and sniffle quietly into handkerchiefs.
Afterward, some of them walk around the adjacent gallery with us: row after
row of grainy photographs, all the mothers' sons and daughters who fell
and continue to fall; ominous spaces left on the walls for the photographs
still to come.

XI.

"It's an honour that we can exchange
experiences with you, because we know that the people of Canada are side
by side with us. We find out in Barricada what the international
community is doing for us; we know Canada is in the vanguard of people
who have helped us even in our most difficult moments."

We're sitting in the shade of a big
tree, sun baking the ground in dappled patches, listening to Rafael Flores.
Rafael is president of the Gámez Garmendia cooperative near Estelí:
one of the largest and most successful in the region. He speaks in smooth,
measured phrases from under his bright blue New York Yankees cap. (Nicaraguans
are famous baseball fanatics; we come across an old man on the beach at
Corinto spending his afternoon painstakingly scrawling the names of North
American teams into the sand.)

I end up taking notes later from
someone else in the group. It's just too relaxing here to be diligent.
A few flies buzz around; the sun licks at the edges of our shade; and away
in the distance there are futile squeals of protest from what will shortly
be our pork lunch.

Rafael talks about the revolution.
"In 1979, after the third and final insurrection (in Estelí), we
began to work in the streets clearing up the rubble. Some of us were saying,
'What will we do now the bosses have gone?' Then we were told that the
revolution had triumphed, that land would be given to the peasants. So
we thought, let's go out and take some land and farm it.

"We had our eyes on a piece of land
that had absentee owners. Fourteen of us went and started to work it. That
was August 1979. We got basic tools and a bit of money and advice from
the government."

The first crop at Gámez Garmendia
was potatoes and cabbage. "It turned out well. We were able to pay back
the government, and we made 10,000 córdobas profit." That was a
lot of money back then, with a few córdobas to the dollar instead
of 1,400. "Before 1979, I'd never even seen what a thousand-córdoba
note looked like! When word got round of our success, there were plenty
of other people willing to join our co-operative."

"But of course, every year you take
your chances. The next year we bought seed from Guatemala that turned out
to be bad. Our potato crop failed, and we lost money. Our new compañeros
left us, and we were back to the original group of people."

Francisco chips in: a swarthy and
amiable man, tough as nails. "I was an ATC (Rural Workers Union) leader,
and we were told approach people and tell them about the co-ops, encourage
peasants to form them. The idea wasn't new. In the '30s, Sandino and his
men had formed co-ops which were eventually destroyed by the Guard, everybody
killed. But it's not a simple thing, forming one. It requires real ideological
change, asking farmers to work for a larger entity than themselves and
their family."

Gámez Garmendia was the first
in the Estelí region to receive an official title to its land -
third in Nicaragua overall. Eventually the co-operative united with one
nearby. Twelve families joined with eighteen others, and since July of
this year 18 more families have signed up. "The door's open for more,"
Rafael says. "People are in favour of co-ops now. They can see the fruits
of the new system.

"The counter-revolutionaries have
been coming out with all kinds of propaganda crap - saying all the profits
go to the government and so on. It's not true. Leaders visit us to exchange
information and to give us advice and support, not to tell us what to do.
We make our own production and marketing plans. The only thing the government
demands is that we be hard workers and responsible."

It's all very smooth and low-key.
Rafael laughs. "We're proud to have you here with us, because in the past
we would never have had this kind of visit. Before the revolution, only
government ministers received visitors. When we had our first delegation,
back in 1980, we were actually trembling with nervousness!"

No sign of it now. Rafael and Francisco
are proud of the cooperative, and we trot off in groups to explore it a
little on our own, climbing the stony hillside where the goats graze. Eric,
a cheerful Manitoban, slips into a shady glade with his flute. A few seconds
later a rustic melody wafts out over the dales.

Surprise: We've been granted the
afternoon off from our hectic schedule. We spend it lounging around, chowing
on the cooked remains of Mr. Pig whose tragic fate was audible earlier
in the day. Francisco holds court on a stone fence at the shady end of
the fields, talking softly about his militia service in the north, about
fighting the contras.

He has a really remarkable quiet
confidence, cleaning his AK-47, talking of chases and battles and days
when he and his compas were ambushed three or four times in succession.
"The contras are pretty astute," he says, "and in the mountain zones they
have a whole system to manipulate the peasants. But they've never succeeded
in their military objectives."

It echoes comments we've heard throughout
the trip, always with the same matter-of-fact certainty: the contras are
beaten, strategically at least. They're still capable of doing enormous
damage, but it's terrorism, not combat. The Sandinista Army's morale has
grown and that of the contras has fallen, to the point that serious clashes
between the two are now almost unheard of.

The last major engagement was almost
a year ago, in La Trinidad, not far from Estelí. Nine hundred contras
came down from the hills and shot up the town, wrought some havoc, and
retreated. Then the pursuit began. This is the usual procedure. The Sandinistas
take no chances with indiscriminate fire in the towns or settlements under
attack. Instead, they harass the contras constantly, vengefully, as the
rebels race back to their hideouts in Honduras. In the attack on La Trinidad,
the contras lost 150 killed, 350 wounded; 60 more surrendered.

With casualty rates like these, the
contras' recent actions - blowing up civilian buses with land mines, targeting
foreign-aid workers - seem signs of desperation more than anything else.
Terrorism is the war of the weak, and the longer it continues in Nicaragua,
the less the chances of the contras coming to be seen anywhere as an effective
or legitimate opposition force.

It's all very fine, the heat of the
day and the long valley vistas. There's Francisco's conversation, and some
warm rum flowing through the system. Sometimes you have to pinch yourself
and notice just how vulnerable cooperatives like Gámez Garmendia
really are: tucked away a few kilometres off the main road, surrounded
on two or three sides by lush ranges of hills.

I imagine looking up from my reverie
and seeing battalions of blue-clad killers flowing down the hillsides.
Then I look back at Francisco, giving a couple of our internacionalistas
lessons in assembling his old friend, the AK-47. Francisco has seen a few
scenes like that, or something very similar, and he's seen them through.
Confidence.

A notice we saw taped up in Estelí
bore a quote from Sandinista comandante Tomás Borge. When we
run into difficulties, when we are backed into a corner by scarcities,
we should think of those who are fighting and spilling their blood, who
ask only for the strength of heart that comes from doing one's duty.

XII.

In Estelí's central plaza sits
the burned-out shell of a truck. This vehicle, reads an inscription
painted on the side, was destroyed by contras. Miraflores, May 20 1986.

Miraflores is an agricultural cooperative
a few miles to the north, near the border with Jinotega Province. It has
been attacked by contras four times, beginning in 1983. The couple of hundred
workers there have been offered relocation to a safer zone. For the most
part, they've refused, though the majority of women and children have been
removed.

In the May attack, the contras used
M-79 grenade launchers and fragmentation grenades. One worker, an architect,
was caught in one of the defensive trenches ringing the perimeter. He had
his legs blown off by a grenade. He didn't die right away. The contras
set about eviscerating him with bayonets; then they castrated him and left
him there to die slowly. Two small children hiding in a room were blown
apart by a grenade. When Scott, our translator, visited the scene three
months later, the room had been whitewashed, but a few dark pellets of
dried blood were still visible on the ceiling.

Earlier in the day, before our visit
to Gámez Garmendia, we had stopped off at El Portillo, a cooperative
on the outskirts of town. There, we had seen army helicopters thrumming
busily overhead. On the way back into town, we were told that Miraflores
- fifteen kilometres and two or three hillcrests away - was once again
under attack.

We kept our eye on the papers, but
nothing appeared in Barricada or El Nuevo Diario. The action
seems to have been more of a nip at the cooperative's defences than anything
else, a warning of things to come. Or it may not have happened at all.
Like any country in wartime, Nicaragua is alive with unsubstantiated rumours.

XIII.

Ridiculous, really, and astonishing
- but the revolution is still moving forward. Shortly after we arrived
in Nicaragua, Rio San Juan, a town near the Costa Rican border, won a UNESCO
award for an innovative adult literacy program it had created. It is part
of the Nicaraguan experiment with popular education, which began in Brazil
with Paulo Freire's seminal Pedagogy of the Oppressed and is now
a topic of discussion and contention all around the world - Canada included.

It is described to us by Eduardo
Baéz; and in Eduardo's energy and enthusiasm I find what may be
my most vivid imagine of Nicaragua. You can weep for all the opportunities
lost and crushes, the immense obstacles, the way Reagan's war is bleeding
sectors of Nicaragua - health care, education - when all the world should
be rejoicing at the advances made in those fields. But then you
can talk with Eduardo, and see what is still possible on a wing and a prayer
in this country, with nothing but ideas and commitment and hard work to
tide you over.

"Popular education," Eduardo tells
us, "is a totally different concept from traditional education. The traditional
form depends on the stereotypes of all knowledge being found in books,
and teachers being the repositories of all that's knowable."

He sits on the counter in an office
at Estelí's adult education centre, swinging his legs rhythmically
back and forth like an eager schoolkid, talking in rapid-fire English.
Eduardo studied in the States back in the early '70s, "back in the good
times." He still keeps the blue jeans and long hair from that era.

"We're developing a concept of knowledge
not as a passive thing, but as the capacity one has to understand reality
in order to change it. It's really a very subversive concept of education.
If you want to change a building, but don't understand its structure, you
may end up painting the building, but you won't change it. ... The challenge
of popular education is to take school out of the classroom and into
the community, into daily life and reality - work, the family, society.

"This project in Rio San Juan has
involved all the teachers in the region, unions, women's organizations,
everybody. It's organized by the people at a local level, not under centralized
control - and all this in a war zone that's also one of the most underdeveloped
regions of Nicaragua. The people are learning things related to real
life - health, hygiene, defense, social problems, community organizing,
and so on."

He grabs an alphabetization manual.
"First lesson: 'Education Is Our Right.' Second lesson: 'The Kid Has Diarrhoea.'
Then comes reading and writing practice. The objectives are integrated,
you see. Lesson three: 'He Brings Down the Potato' - a chance to discuss
food, nutrition, and so on." Eduardo flips through the manual rapidly.
"Here: 'The Kid Sucks the Tit.' Breast-feeding. The language is the people's
language, not some scientific jargon that would mean nothing to them."

What about criticisms of the political
content of Nicaraguan textbooks? "There's not a single sentence like 'Long
Live Sandino' in this textbook. That was a mistake we made in our first
textbooks, trying to inculcate a revolutionary ethic and so forth. We finally
realized that sort of thing has to develop naturally. It can't be
forced. There's things occasionally like adding up the number of grenades
in the picture, sure. It's reality for people here! You're not going
to be adding apples and oranges when grenades are falling on your roof."

Not surprisingly, teachers of popular
education have been one of the contras' main targets. Dozens have been
killed or kidnapped. The alternative offered by the counter-revolution
is revealing. A doctor at a neighbourhood clinic in Managua told us that
in backward areas like Rio San Juan, health workers have met resistance
from campesinos who have been exposed to contra propaganda. The contras
tell the peasants that health workers who comes with needles are planning
to inoculate them with communism.

XIV.

After the fresher climes of the north,
Managua is a sauna bath, muggy and uncomfortable. Our last couple of days
in Nicaragua are a whirl of meetings and wrap-up discussions. The day before
we leave, we have one last chat with Anna-Patricia of the CNSP. Where will
Nicaragua be in a year's time? Anna-Patricia isn't sure.

"Nineteen eighty-seven is going to
be the most complicated and difficult year we've had since 1979. There's
the legislative elections in the States, elections in several Western European
countries - a whole range of imponderables. We still haven't seen the results
of the $100 million in contra aid (passed by the U.S. Congress in Summer
1986), or of the $300 million allotted by the CIA. But everything we've
seen leads us to conclude that still further military aggression will be
carried out. The international scene is complex and deteriorating. Only
our enemies seem united. The threat of direct U.S. intervention is still
grave.

"We, and those working in solidarity
with us, are going to have to find a way to get us through another year.
There's a big drive underway to make the contras look like a legitimate
opposition; you in Canada are going to have to counter that in your own
work. For our part, we can only work to make the American public understand
how costly, on all levels, direct U.S. intervention would be. What it would
mean for hundreds of thousands of Americans to be killed; the kind
of historical consequences there would be for all Latin America."

It's sobering. Diana, an Ottawa volunteer,
asks: "Do you think the U.S. pressure is killing the Nicaraguan revolution?"

Anna-Patricia gathers her thoughts
for a moment. Then: "Don't imagine that the revolution is the economy.
The revolution means holding guaranteed power. This small territory of
ours is still in our hands, and I think the revolution is more vibrant,
more alive than ever. We have to admit that the U.S. intervention is causing
us great, perhaps irreparable damage. But those who are making the decisions
here are the people themselves, the organized people and the FSLN.
The day the people no longer support the revolution, then we'll have failed."

The day is not yet.

Sandino Airport, one last time. The
young customs official hands my passport back to me. "Gracias,"
I say, "y viva Nicaragua libre." He grins broadly. "Gracias.
Adios."

On our way back to Canada, we spend
a day in San José, Costa Rica. There are banks and Pizza Huts; there
are policemen in green fatigues, with pistols and billy clubs, who return
smiles with glowers. The range of trivial consumer goods in the stores
is dizzying, almost overpowering after the material paucity of Nicaragua.
It is Costa Rican National Independence Day. The flag-laden vans racing
through the streets are obviously government-hired, and the cheers in the
street sound more than a little ragged.

La Prensa, the reactionary
rag shut down by the Sandinistas a few months ago, has a new life as Nicaragua
Hoy, publishing as an insert to the conservative La Nación.
The masthead features an outline map of Nicaragua, tangled in barbed wire.

XV.

"I can't even play the thing,"
he said, tapping the bleached lid [of the piano] with his elegant fingers.
"I tell myself I will one day; I'll take lessons or get a book. But I don't
really care. I've learnt to live with being half-finished. Like most of
us."
- John Le Carré, A Small
Town in Germany

Maybe, just maybe, revolutions are getting
better.

Think about it for a moment. The
French Revolution, 1789: limited bourgeois origins, then chaos, carnage,
and a tyranny as cruel as the one it overthrew. The Russian Revolution,
1917: a country dragged kicking and screaming into the twentieth century,
but by a fairly narrowly-based urban intelligentsia and proletariat, and
with millions of disgruntled peasants killed in the process. The Chinese
and Vietnamese Revolutions, 1949-54: the developing unity of city and countryside
against corrupt, foreign-backed despotisms; considerable material gains,
tempered (at least in the Chinese experiment) by massive violence and present-day
stagnation. Cuba, 1959: the advent of a strikingly robust socialist culture,
a standard of living unheard-of in the region, but a pattern of political
repression that is by now all too familiar.

Nicaragua, 1979, seems different.
The reasons are manifold, and would take a great deal longer than two weeks
to appraise properly.

There is, first, the nature of the
revolution itself. At least in its final stages, it marshalled a broad
cross-section of the labouring and business classes to overthrow the Somoza
dictatorship. For idealistic and pragmatic reasons, the Sandinista leadership
has found it worthwhile to encourage "responsible" pluralistic thought
and discussion. (Those who point to increasingly strict limitations on
this pluralism ought to remember that the civil-liberties record of North
American and European countries in wartime is hardly spectacular.) Indeed,
many Nicaraguans would disagree with Sandinista policy, without necessarily
questioning the motives and sincerity of that policy.

Related to this, and it seems to
me every bit as important, is the growing alliance between the revolution
and progressive Christianity. Entre cristianismo y revolución,
no hay contradicción! Between this Christianity and this
revolution, there is no contradiction.

This isn't to deny the very real
degree of polarization in Nicaragua's church. It is merely to note that,
where politics and religion have fused in Nicaragua, they have formed a
hybrid world-view and aesthetic that, in some ways, is to previous revolutions
as the Iron Age is to the Bronze Age.

This thought occurred to me while
speaking with a woman in one Managua barrio who was organizer of
a base Christian community. She spoke with fervour of the movement against
Somoza and the role Christianity had played in mobilizing and motivating
people to overthrow the dictatorship. She showed us the dusty graveyard
for the dozens of neighbourhood residents killed in the revolution. And
later that night we went to a party: a raucous affair at which this very
sincere, very committed middle-aged woman let loose with lusty renditions
of well-known revolutionary songs. She followed that up with a rather suggestive
tune whose general thrust was conveyed with a campy strut that would have
made Mae West blush. Politics, Christianity, and unabashed good times:
in one evening, in one person.

Faith, like any catalyst for human
progress, flows underground. It is not something that can be tapped in
a brief visit, and I resist drawing firm conclusions. But the words of
Conor Cruise O'Brien bear considering. Writing in August's Atlantic
Monthly, he notes:

You can actually feel around
you in Nicaragua something going on that you know can't be switched off,
either from Washington or from Rome: that most intractable thing, a new
kind of faith. ... I think it would now be more accurate to speak of Sandinismo
as a faith rather than an ideology. It is the most formidable kind
of faith - the kind that is emotionally fused with national pride. And
this kind of faith is now alight in every corner of Latin America. ...
It is true that in the past the United States has been able to intervene
in Latin America repeatedly and with impunity. But things are a bit different
now; there is a new spirit around. In particular, the new alignment of
el Dios de los Pobres (the God of the Poor) and la patria
- faith and fatherland - is shifting the balance.

O'Brien adds that "The Sandinistas sincerely
pride themselves on their magnanimous and positive approach to religion
and on having altogether abandoned the doctrinaire hostility to all religion
which has hitherto been common to all revolutions claiming any degree of
Marxist inspiration." Whether this new revolutionary alignment will prove
strong enough to withstand the superpower assault is open to question.
But its energy, resilience, and potential are all beyond doubt.

Real abuses have occurred - and still
occur - in Nicaragua. The Sandinista revolution, under fire, remains incomplete.
Yet against all odds, and contrary to my expectations, the Nicaraguans
we met last month showed no inclination to settle for that as an end-product.
They showed even less desire to back-pedal in a fashion that Ronald Reagan
and his counter-revolutionary clique might find halfway acceptable.

Who, after all, wants to live a half-finished
life? Patria libre o morir.

Nicaragua, 1986 (Photo by Adam Jones).

Books on Nicaragua at Amazon.com

Created by Adam Jones, 1998.
No copyright claimed for non-commercial use if source is acknowledged and notified.adamj_jones@hotmail.com.
Last updated: 10 October 2000.